see dangerhart.com for an eyeful

Accidental Death & Dismemberment

After a few more hours of tweaking bubbles out of Peter, I carried him across the room to put him in his box- as we were heading to the foundry so he could be cast in bronze. I’m not quite sure what happened: I repositioned my grip and suddenly his torso sheared away at his hips, I managed to save the torso/head but the legs hit the floor and shattered into a zillion pieces. It hadn’t been a great wax to start from, and I’d put 20 hours of chasing to get it up to snuff.

I set what was left down and tried to squeeze my own head as it wanted to shatter and explode as well. I swept up the wax bits and put them in the melting pot.

I went in the house and stomped around for a bit, then put the mold back into the truck and drove all the way down to the foundry in Alpine and dropped it off for them to pour a new wax.

Why not just use the second wax Peter that I had picked up on Monday? You know, the one that probably had tighter seams and would be a cleaner pull. Well, I didn’t notice til I went to work on it just how messed up it was. The most serious issue was that it had a double figure, as one layer of wax had chilled and another layer had slipped underneath it. The first layer had warped up into the inside of the back creating a one inch gap between the two figures. I tried to salvage it, but it was really too far off. That and the base was broken, and continued to shatter as I tried to fix it. (images 3 & 4)

I got back home around 2pm, packed up the dog and the skis and drove up to Park City for a X-country sanity check. The fog that rolled into the valley last night and will blanket the valley in smog through the weekend peeled away up in the canyon. There were just a few people out on the track, so Cmonster and I had a nice zippy time in the warm sun & fast snow. After a few miles my sanity began to return, and the shadows became blue and long and cold and we jumped back down into the smog.

The broken figure & the bad wax will eventually become part of the vivisected forms that have been percolating in my subconscious. Maybe I’ll just go back to the simple pleasures of painting for a bit- painters have no idea…